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    Famous Men Who Never Lived
    Famous Men Who Never Lived
    Famous Men Who Never Lived
    Audiobook9 hours

    Famous Men Who Never Lived

    Written by K. Chess

    Narrated by Amy Landon

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    For fans of Station Eleven and Exit West, Famous Men Who Never Lived explores the effects of displacement on our identities, the communities that come together through circumstance, and the power of art to save us.

    Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States-an alternate timeline-she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts-a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback-and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture.

    But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel's efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateMar 5, 2019
    ISBN9781684410750
    Famous Men Who Never Lived

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    Reviews for Famous Men Who Never Lived

    3.5/5

    37 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A science fiction novel that is much more about atmosphere and emotion than science. An immigrant story, about the longing for a self, a community, and a history that no longer exists.
    • 4/5
      Helen "Hel" Nash is a resident of New York City, only it's not her New York City. Her New York City has been irradiated into uninhabitability, and she is one of the approximately 156,000 people who were lucky enough to escape through an experimental interdimensional portal before the end. Now a "Universally Displaced Person," she lives with another UDP and spends her days dwelling over the world that she left behind. While contemplating the divergent fates of a beloved science fiction author from her world, she decides to convert his home into a museum for UDPs, one memorializing the world they had lost by containing the remaining fragments from it.

      In this novel, K Chess offers a different approach to the traditional alternate history novel. Whereas most such works thrive on the concept of difference, as refugees from a doomed world her characters are practically drowning in it. This allows Chess to hammer home the concept of alienation that these people feel, one that she underscores nicely by focusing on the small things in which people invest so much of their emotion and identity. The result transcends many of the other books of its genre to become a touching meditation about the relationship between identity and place, one richer for the considerable effort the author put into realizing the very different world to which her characters belonged.
    • 3/5
      Famous Men Who Never Lived is built upon a tremendous premise: survivors from a doomed alternate timeline, selected through lottery, flee through a portal into our world. They're registered, treated as refugees, and forced to endure stigmas they cannot shake and restrictions that deny them their freedom. Their presence draws parallels to the Book of Revelation (their number was relatively close to 144,000). Their knowledge of the world, their speech, their culture—all of these were left in another reality.The premise is fabulous, but the implementation was off. There's so much potential here, but it's untapped. We're told that these two worlds had identical histories until the the first decade of the twentieth century. In the last 110 years, however, everything has changed. In this other timeline, South America is a super power, the United States uses the metric system, the swastika is a peaceful symbol of eternity, every posh neighborhood is a slum, every celebrity you've ever heard of never rose to fame. Nearly every piece of history since 1909 has been turned upside down. If it happened in your world in the last hundred years, it apparently didn't happen in theirs. You were never born, neither were your parents or their parents. And I find this not only hard to believe, but anticlimactic. Here's a chance to to tackle issues that could be fun to explore: What if you run into the parallel you? What if your child who died in the parallel timeline is alive in this one? What if some maniacal tyrant from the other timeline lives in peace in this one? None of this is explored. Instead, after such a brilliant setup, we're given a rather run-of-the-mill thriller that plays out like an episode of Scooby-Doo. (Those in the other timeline didn't have Scooby, however, so they may have thought they were being original.)When Famous Men Who Never Lived focuses on the human side of the story, it's wonderful. Like when the protagonist is considering the son she left behind. Or the dichotomy of world that welcomes these refugees who have nowhere else to go, but binds them in yellow tape. Even the simple nostalgia for a world one can never return to. I would've loved a story like that. At some point, though, the action took over and a villain had to be constructed. I hate stories with villains—it's a constraint of our world that I find so incredibly limiting and boring. Maybe there's another reality out there where literature isn't littered with all these villains, and if so, I do hope some day to visit it.If you like science-fiction-based mysteries with a plot that is too light for literary readers and too dense for thrill-seeking readers, this is the perfect novel for you!